#1,599

The “cultural” expressions of these “new countries” are not originally born one from another, like branches from the same trunk.
On the contrary, being imported, they superimpose themselves mechanically one onto another, like aeolian alluvia.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 265

#1,598

Where he is easy to refute, as in the natural sciences, the imbecile can be useful without being dangerous.
Where he is difficult to refute, as in the humanities, the imbecile is dangerous without being useful.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 265

#1,597

I trust less in the arguments of reason than in the antipathies of intelligence.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 265

#1,596

A confused idea attracts a fool like a flame attracts an insect.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 265

#1,595

When an author is put on a school’s syllabus, his name lives and his work dies.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 265

#1,594

The effect of democratic rhetoric on taste is called nausea.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 265

#1,593

The “decisions of the human conscience” are the clandestine echo of fashion.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 265

#1,592

Systematic reductions to single terms (pleasure and pain, self-interest, economics, sex, etc.) fabricate likenesses of intelligibility that seduce the ignorant.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 264

#1,591

Order paralyzes. Disorder convulses.
Inscribing a disorder instituted within an all-inclusive order was the miracle of feudalism.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 264

#1,590

Marx has been the only Marxist whom Marxism has not stultified.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 264

#1,589

The internationalization of the arts does not multiply their sources, but rather the causes of their corruption.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 264

#1,588

No one praises the people except the man who means to sell it something or rob it of something.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 264

#1,587

Civilization is what is born when the soul does not surrender to its congenital vulgarity.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 264

#1,586

The abuse of the printing press is due to the scientific method and the expressionist aesthetic.
To the former because it allows any mediocre person to write a correct and useless monograph, and to the latter because it legitimizes the effusions of any fool.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 264

#1,585

The modern mentality does not conceive that order can be imposed without resorting to police regulations.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 263

#1,584

The absence of God does not clear the way for the tragic but for the sordid.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 263

#1,583

Prayer is the only act in whose effectiveness I trust.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 263

#1,582

The desire to be informed is the dissolvent of culture.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 263

#1,581

The fight against evil today is a rearguard action.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 263

#1,580

Goya is the seer of demons, Picasso their accomplice.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 263

#1,579

The universalism of the plastic medieval languages took shape as regional variations, whereas the local varieties of the current cosmopolitan art are mere solecisms of pronunciation.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 263

#1,578

When originality is rare, innovation abounds.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 263

#1,577

God is that inscrutable feeling of protection at our back.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 262

#1,576

Humanity fell into modern history like an animal into a trap.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 262

#1,575

The reactionary does not argue against the world in the hope of defeating it, but so that the rights of the soul do not prescribe.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 262

#1,574

History inexorably punishes stupidity, but it does not necessarily reward intelligence.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 262

#1,573

Among ideas only the stupid ones are immortal.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 262

#1,572

If they had fewer saviors, societies would need fewer [saviors] to save them.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 262

#1,571

How many things would seem less irritating if we were less envious!

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 262

#1,570

There is an illiteracy of the soul which no diploma cures.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 262

#1,569

History is a series of nights and days.
Of short days and long nights.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 261

#1,568

The supreme folly lies in doing even the most trivial things “on principle.”

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 261

#1,567

We end up treating each other as fungible goods when we cease believing in the soul.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 261

#1,566

Nothing is more difficult than to doubt our victims’ guilt.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 261

#1,565

Problems do not get solved; they merely go out of fashion.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 261

#1,564

The press does not intend to inform the reader but rather to persuade the reader that it informs him.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 261

#1,563

Individuals, in modern society, are each day more similar to one another and each day more estranged from one another.
Identical monads clashing with each other with ferocious individualism.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 261

#1,562

Just as evil was the first betrayal, betrayal is the only sin.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 260

#1,561

Not everything betrays us, but there is nothing that cannot betray us.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 260

#1,560

He who believes he is pardoning a vile sentiment by saying it is sincere is merely making it worse.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 260

#1,559

To have common sense is to have a presentiment in each concrete case of the pertinent limitations of the intellect.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 260

#1,558

The great man’s errors are so painful for us because they give a fool the chance to correct them.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 260

#1,557

Instead of “industrial society,” it is in fashion to say “consumer society” in order to avoid the problem by pretending to confront it.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 260

#1,556

In the last century they could fear that modern ideas would be right.
Today we see that they were only going to win.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 260

#1,555

The press always chooses what to praise with impeccably bad taste.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 259

#1,554

Man’s only precious goods are the moldy memories of his imagination.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 259

#1,553

The mastery which man has gained over nature only helps him to debase it without fear.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 259

#1,552

Man does not admire anything sincerely except what is undeserved.
Talent, lineage, beauty.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 259

#1,551

Making us feel intelligent is how nature notifies us that we are saying something stupid.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 259

#1,550

The plethora of objects in the midst of which we live has made us insensible to the quality, to the texture, to the individuality, of the object.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 259

#1,549

We try to excuse the defects we have by supposing they are the reverse of qualities we falsely attribute to ourselves.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 259

#1,548

Rather than humanizing technology, modern man prefers to technify man.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 258

#1,547

While the democratic voter disposes of another man’s fate, his has already been disposed of by a bureaucrat.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 258

#1,546

History is irreversible.
But it is not unrepeatable.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 258

#1,545

Man needs less to solve his problems than to believe that they have been solved.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 258

#1,544

True eloquence causes the audience to tremble but does not convince it.
Without the promise of spoils no oratory is effective.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 258

#1,543

Intellectual vulgarity attracts voters like flies.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 258

#1,542

Power does not necessarily corrupt anyone except the revolutionary who assumes it.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 258

#1,541

Cordiality tends to be less an effusion of goodness than of bad manners.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 258

#1,540

The distance between interlocutors of different generations is proportional to the stupidity of each interlocutor.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 257

#1,539

Vulgarity is not a product of the people but a subproduct of bourgeois prosperity.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 257

#1,538

An excess of etiquette paralyzes; a lack of etiquette animalizes.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 257

#1,537

The technification of the world blunts one’s sensibility and does not refine one's senses.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 257

#1,536

The current liturgy makes official the secular divorce between the clergy and the arts.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 257

#1,535

The despotic decisions of the modern state are, in the end, made by an anonymous, subordinate, pusillanimous bureaucrat, who is probably also a cuckold.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 257

#1,534

Youths are not necessarily revolutionary but rather necessarily dogmatic.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 257

#1,533

“Social” is the adjective that serves as a pretext for all swindles.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 256

#1,532

Public opinion today is not the sum of personal opinions.
Personal opinions, on the contrary, are the echo of public opinion.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 256

#1,531

The democrat is capable of sacrificing even his interests to his resentments.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 256

#1,530

Adapting to the modern world demands the hardening of one’s sensibility and the debasing of one’s character.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 256

#1,529

Capable men accept degrading themselves in order to triumph.
And eventually they fail because they degraded themselves.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 256

#1,528

Although we may have to yield to the torrent of collective stupidities dragging us along in its current, let us not allow ourselves to be dissolved in its mud.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 256

#1,527

The modern state is the transformation of the apparatus which society developed for its defense into an autonomous organism which exploits it.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 256

#1,526

Our soul has a future.
Humanity has none.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 255

#1,525

Revolutions do not solve any problem other than their leaders’ economic problem.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 255

#1,524

The Church will need centuries of prayer and silence to forge anew its flabby soul.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 255

#1,523

I understand that Communism which is a protest, but not that which is a hope.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 255

#1,522

We should admire or detest things for what they are, not for the consequences they may have.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 255

#1,521

The self-important man’s lack of importance is sufficient revenge for us.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 255

#1,520

It is possible to inculcate in the contemporary bourgeois any stupid idea in the name of progress and to sell him any grotesque object in the name of art.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 255

#1,519

The ruling class of an agrarian society is an aristocracy, that of an industrial society an oligarchy.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 255

#1,518

Class struggles are episodes.
The fabric of history is the conflict between equals.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 254

#1,517

Happiness is the prickly flower of intelligent resignation.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 254

#1,516

Sociology protects the sociologist from all contact with reality.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 254

#1,515

The left’s ideas produce revolutions; revolutions produce the right’s ideas.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 254

#1,514

When the modern consciousness suspends its economic routines, it only oscillates between political anguish and sexual obsession.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 254

#1,513

Today, whoever does not shout is neither heard nor understood.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 254

#1,512

A woman has the intellectual temperature of the medium in which she lives: vehement revolutionary or dauntless conservative, according to the circumstances.
A reactionary she can never be.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 254

#1,511

Not intelligence but vanity reproaches “intellectual isolation.”

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 254

#1,510

The Church, since the clergy became plebeian, curses all the conquered and applauds all the conquerors.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 253

#1,509

Rhetoric is the only flower in the garden of democracy.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 253

#1,508

Democrats can be divided into two classes:
those who perish
because they do not succeed in suppressing with speeches the passions they unleashed with their harangues;
those who survive
because they alternate with the rhetoric that whips up the people's anger the grapeshot that pacifies it.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 253

#1,507

Moderate democrats promulgate the laws with which radical democrats exterminate them.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 253

#1,506

Freedom of the press is a nascent democracy’s first demand and a mature democracy’s first victim.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 253

#1,505

Journalists are the plebs’ courtiers.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 253

#1,504

The shamelessness with which the revolutionary kills is more frightening than his killings.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 253

#1,503

Democracy has terror for its means and totalitarianism for its end.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 252

#1,502

The bourgeois does not applaud the man he admires, but the man he fears.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 252

#1,501

Absolute monarchies disposed with less fickleness of the fortunes of one individual than popular absolutisms dispose of the destiny of entire social classes.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 252

#1,500

The number of votes by which a ruler is elected is not a measure of his legitimacy but his mediocrity.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 252

#1,499

Democrats describe a past that never existed and predict a future that is never realized.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 252

#1,498

Rather than an ideological strategy, the Left is a lexicographical tactic.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 252

#1,497

Souls become vitiated when bodies make themselves too comfortable.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 252

#1,496

Just as dangerous as believing the desirable to be possible is believing the possible to be desirable.
Sentimental utopias and automatisms of technology.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 252

#1,495

After the intelligent opinions have been excluded from the opinions of an age, what is left over is “public opinion.”

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 251

#1,494

I am the asylum of all the ideas displaced by modern ignominy.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 251

Bastille Day

The war in the Vendée is the only political conflict that arouses my complete sympathy without troubling my reason.

Notas, p. 465

#1,493

Sexual promiscuity is the tip society pays in order to appease its slaves.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 251

#1,492

What the mob calls history is a florilegium of erroneous interpretations compiled by the passion of the day.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 251

#1,491

Parliaments elected by means of universal suffrage first lose their moral prestige and then their political importance.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 251

#1,490

Only by establishing hierarchies can we limit the imperialism of the idea and the absolutism of power.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 251

#1,489

An event arouses passion less when its protagonists are interesting than when its observers are intelligent.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 251

#1,488

The imagination is not the site where reality is falsified, but where it is fulfilled.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 250

#1,487

The past is the source of poetry; the future is the arsenal of rhetoric.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 250

#1,486

The Catholic theologian fulfills his duty only by disrespecting the letter of the vespers and the spirit of the day.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 250

#1,485

“Constructive criticism,” in our time, is what helps perfect prisons.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 250

#1,484

“To deduce the consequences of a fact” is something that is impossible.
We can only deduce the consequences of our opinion of it.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 250

#1,483

The wealthy man’s sin is not his wealth, but the exclusive importance he attributes to it.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 250

#1,482

To philosophize is not to solve problems but to live them at a certain level.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 250

#1,481

History owes its importance to the values that emerge there, not to the masses of men who are shipwrecked there.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 249

#1,480

Hatred of the past is an unequivocal sign that a society is becoming more plebeian.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 249

#1,479

Revolutionary agitation is an endemic in the cities and only an epidemic in the country.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 249

#1,478

The cause of the modern disease is the conviction that man can cure himself.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 249

#1,477

We cannot escape the triviality of existence through the gates, but rather only through the roofs.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 249

#1,476

Oneiric poetry does not prophesy; it snores.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 249

#1,475

Civilizations are not made “avec des idées” but with good manners.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 249

#1,474

What I say here will seem trivial to whoever does not know everything to which I allude.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 249

#1,473

That which impersonalizes degrades.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 248

#1,472

That patriotism which is not a carnal adhesion to specific landscapes, is rhetoric designed by semi-educated men to spur the illiterate on towards the slaughterhouse.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 248

#1,471

Authentic intellectual seriousness does not frown, but smiles.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 248

#1,470

Modern liberalism no longer defends any of the “rights of man” except the right to consume.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 248

#1,469

Man matures when he stops believing that politics solves his problems.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 248

#1,468

In the universities, philosophy merely hibernates.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 248

#1,467

The progressive’s enthusiasm, the democrat’s arguments, the materialist’s demonstrations are the reactionary’s delicious and succulent food.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 248

#1,466

Mere talent is in literature what good intentions are in conduct. (L'enfer en est pavé.)

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 248

#1,465

The liturgy can definitely only speak in Latin.
In the vernacular it is vulgar.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 247

#1,464

The highest and the lowest used to belong to the same species.
Today they belong to different species.
There is today no characteristic in common between what has worth and what rules.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 247

#1,463

More than one presumed “theological problem” comes only from the lack of respect with which God treats our prejudices.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 247

#1,462

Let us not pompously recommend that the inevitable be accepted with “heroism,” but rather that it be welcomed with courteous resignation.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 247

#1,461

The egalitarian becomes exasperated when he sees that mandatory schooling wipes out conventional inequality only to aggravate innate inequality.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 247

#1,460

The two wings of intelligence are erudition and love.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 247

#1,459

In certain ages the spirit loses, no matter who wins.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 247

#1,458

Man tends toward superficiality like a cork floats to the surface.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 246

#1,457

In politics we should distrust even intelligent optimism and trust the imbecile’s fears.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 246

#1,456

Evil is not more interesting than good, but easier to relate.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 246

#1,455

Progressive Christians painstakingly search through sociology manuals for material with which to fill lacunae in the Gospel.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 246

#1,454

I do not resign myself to the fact of man’s idiotic collaboration with death, by ravaging, demolishing, reforming, abolishing.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 246

#1,453

It is in the spontaneity of what I feel where I search for the coherence of what I think.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 246

#1,452

Newspaper reports are the modern substitute for experience.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 246

#1,451

Hierarchies are heavenly.
In Hell all are equal.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 245

#1,450

Imbecility changes the subject in each age so that it is not recognized.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 245

#1,449

Modern “Eastern spirituality,” like the Eastern art of the last centuries, is merchandise from a bazaar.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 245

#1,448

Propose solutions?
As if the world were not drowning in solutions!

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 245

#1,447

Man today oscillates between the sterile rigidity of the law and the vulgar disorder of instinct.
He knows nothing of discipline, courtesy, good taste.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 245

#1,446

We cannot find shelter in the Gospel alone, as we also cannot take refuge in the seed of the oak tree, but rather next to the twisted trunk and under the disorder of the branches.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 245

#1,445

The cultural standard of an intelligent people sinks as its standard of living rises.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 244

#1,444

Revolutions are frightening, but election campaigns are disgusting.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 244

#1,443

Eroticism is the rabid recourse of souls and times that are in agony.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 244

#1,442

Even the enemy of technology denounces its public, but trivial, outrages more than its invisible, but disastrous, destructions.
(As if contemporary man’s feverish migration, for instance, were disturbing because of traffic accidents.)

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 244

#1,441

Envy is not a poor man’s vice, but a rich man’s.
Of a less rich man before a richer man.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 244

#1,440

Democratic tribunals do not make the guilty tremble, but rather the accused.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 243

#1,439

Revolution is progressivist and seeks the strengthening of the state; rebellion is reactionary and seeks its disappearance.
The revolutionary is a potential government official; the rebel is a reactionary in action.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 243

#1,438

The problem is not sexual repression, nor sexual liberation, but sex.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 243

#1,437

Cynicism is not a measure of astuteness but of impotence.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 243

#1,436

Nothing deserves more respect than the unfortunate people that has to beg, but nothing deserves less respect than the absurd drugs for which it clamors to remedy its misfortune.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 243

#1,435

Nothing is more unforgivable than voluntarily imprisoning ourselves in another’s convictions, when we should be trying to break through even the bars in the dungeon of our own intelligence.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 243

#1,434

A youth, normally, ends up resembling the adult he most despises.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 242

#1,433

Confusing the popular with the democratic is the democrat’s tactical ruse.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 242

#1,432

There are no more old people, only decrepit youths.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 242

#1,431

Nothing is more common than to transform a duty that inconveniences us into an “ethical dilemma.”

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 242

#1,430

The fervor with which the Marxist invokes the future society would be moving if the rites of invocation were less bloody.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 242

#1,429

Each new generation criticizes the previous one, only to commit, in analogous circumstances, the opposite mistake.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 242

#1,428

Rudeness is not a proof of authenticity, but of bad manners.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 242

#1,427

Courtesy is not incompatible with anything.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 241

#1,426

The sacrifice of profundity is the price demanded by efficiency.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 241

#1,425

Totalitarianism is the sinister fusion of religion and the state.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 241

#1,424

The state is totalitarian by its essence.
Total despotism is the form towards which it spontaneously tends.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 241

#1,423

Modern optimism is a commercial product designed to oil the wheels of industry.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 241

#1,422

We should all resign ourselves to not being enough at first and to being more than enough later.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 241

#1,421

The egalitarian considers courtesy a confession of inferiority.
Among egalitarians rudeness marks rank.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 241

#1,420

Several civilizations were plundered because freedom inadvertently opened the gate to the enemy.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 241

#1,419

Great democratic upheavals do incurable harm to the soul of a people.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 240

#1,418

The higher part of ethics does not deal with moral behavior, but with the quality of the soul.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 240

#1,417

Fools become indignant only with consequences.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 240

#1,416

Those who are who active in the new left today are disoriented and helpless reactionaries.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 240

#1,415

Where gestures lack style, ethics itself becomes debased.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 240

#1,414

Without a certain religious childishness, a certain intellectual profundity is unattainable.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 240

#1,413

The people will adopt even refined opinions if those opinions are preached with crude arguments.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 240

#1,412

The increasing freedom of customs in modern society has not suppressed domestic conflicts.
It has only taken away their dignity.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 240

#1,411

It is not possible to hope for anything now that the State is the soul’s only recourse against its own chaos.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 239

#1,410

Social improvements do not come from powerful shake-ups, but from light nudges.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 239

#1,409

We do not invoke God as defendants, but as parched lands.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 239

#1,408

To punish an idea, the gods condemn it to inspiring enthusiasm in the fool.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 239

#1,407

Let us learn to accompany those we love in their errors, without becoming their accomplices.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 239

#1,406

Someone who lacks vocabulary to analyze his ideas christens them intuitions.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 239

#1,405

Man does not find himself thrown only among objects.
He is also immersed in religious experiences.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 239

#1,404

Nobody, nothing, in the end forgives.
Except Christ.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 239

#1,403

Modern pedagogy neither cultivates nor educates; it merely transmits opinions.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 238

#1,402

Everything can be sacrificed to the misery of the people.
Nothing should be sacrificed to its greed.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 238

#1,401

Will the revolutionary learn some day that revolutions prune rather than uproot?

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 238

#1,400

To be a Marxist appears to consist in exempting Communist societies from the Marxist interpretation.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 238

#1,399

Today it is called “having common sense” not to protest against the abject.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 238

#1,398

After several periods of urbanism, as well as several interludes of war, the rural and urban context of the cultivated era will not survive except in linguistic atlases and etymological dictionaries.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 238

#1,397

The soul is not in the body, but rather the body is in the soul.
But it is in the body where we feel the soul.
The absolute is not in history, but rather history is in the absolute.
But it is in history where we discover the absolute.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 238

#1,396

It is not from starvation that the spirit sometimes dies, but from satiety of trivialities.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 237

#1,395

We call the beauty of a language the skill with which some write it.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 237

#1,394

Specialized vocabularies allow one to speak with precision in the natural sciences and to disguise trivialities in the humanities.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 237

4th of July

The best thing about the United States is a confused, but profound, sense of the importance of each man. It is like a kind of primitive humanism, a kind of elemental liberalism.
For a certain type of American there easily sprouts up a demand for independence, an impossibility of accepting anything his conscience does not ordain.
The danger of that naive individualism lies in the confidence it bestows upon itself. It thus prepares the ground for the germination of ridiculous doctrines and sects, which are not tempered by any criticism, nor disturbed by any irony.
The inevitable reverse of that quality is provincialism.

Notas, p.60

#1,393

The modern world will not be punished.
It is the punishment.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 237

#1,392

Degradation is the current price of brotherhood.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 237

#1,391

There are words for deceiving others, like “rational.”
And others, like “dialectic,” for deceiving oneself.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 237

#1,390

The secular importance of religion lies less in its influence on our conduct than on the noble sonority with which it enriches the soul.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 237

#1,389

When one century’s writers can write nothing but boring things, we readers change century.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 237

#1,388

Only for God are we irreplaceable.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 236

#1,387

Men can be divided into those who make their life complicated to gain their soul and those who waste their soul to make their life easier.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 236

#1,386

Modern history is the dialogue between two men: one who believes in God, another who believes he is a god.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 236

#1,385

A work of art, today, is anything that sells for a high price.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 236

#1,384

When the object loses its sensual fullness and becomes an instrument or a sign, reality evaporates and God vanishes.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 236

#1,383

Revolutions swing back and forth between puritanism and debauchery, without touching civilized ground.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 236

#1,382

Someone who forgives everything, because he understands everything, simply has not understood anything.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 236

#1,381

A fool is someone who has opinions about the clichés of the day.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 236

#1,380

He who teaches end up believing that he knows.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 235

#1,379

Pain leaves a deep impression, but only the ethical conflict educates.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 235

#1,378

There is no “ideal” tolerable for more than a few days.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 235

#1,377

Sex and violence do not replace transcendence after it has been banished.
Not even the devil remains for the man who loses God.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 235

#1,376

Political science is the art of quantifying the amount of freedom man can handle and the amount of servitude he needs.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 235

#1,375

Legal freedom of expression has grown alongside the sociological enslavement of thought.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 235

#1,374

The politician attends to nothing with seriousness except to something trivial.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 235

#1,373

Our plans should be modest, our hopes boundless.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 235

#1,372

A man is called a Communist if he fights for the state to assure him a bourgeois life.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 234